Hey, I haven’t been very musical in a while, so I decided to sit down with some hours of Monday left to go and make it a musical one. I don’t have a lot to chat about today…so listen to the music, turn up the speakers and DANCE! http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1nua7_the-time-jungle-love-morris-day_music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBzA0zdtkJI
Do Sexual Harassment and Racism Belong in Fiction? Sexual harassment and racism…pretty taboo topics, right? That’s why I chose to tackle them. I don’t like to read, nor do I like to write mindless entertainment. Most readers nowadays want a fluffy romance with minor complications and a HEA. While I do concede to Happy Ever Afters, I make sure it’s a rocky road to get there. You will find sexual harassment and racism both in Afterburn. Having been an aircraft mechanic for eleven years, I was dying to write about a woman grease monkey. Nobody else is! And let me tell you something about harassment…it’s ugly, but it’s there. Sexual harassment happens to women in male-dominated professions on an everyday basis. So, it’s an issue in Afterburn. It’s a fact of life and fiction isn’t real if it doesn’t portray real life. Racism: Another ugly, but sadly, real life issue. Even in
I decided to try something different for my blog, focus less on the specific craft of writing and spend some time talking about the entire creative process. I realized that creativity doesn’t start and stop when I type up my stories. It’s no accident that crafting, writing, singing and other creative arts are often found in one person. I grew up on a steady diet of broomstick crochet, macramé, knitting, crocheting, tatting, embroidery, piano lessons, vocal lessons and the like. I love to read and I do love to write. The only thing that I didn’t do much with was drawing/painting. I can draw a tree and that’s about it. Sparking creativity is a must if one wants to write and write well. In former blog posts, you’ll see that I don’t believe in writer’s block. Why should I believe in something that blocks my creative flow? Why
The Midwest Fiction Writers, a local chapter for the Romance Writers of America, pulled together 17 writers who each submitted a short story for a fundraiser. Roughing It or Luxury Jody Vitek Roadside Love, in the MFW anthology Love in the Land of Lakes, is a short story I wrote based on annual vacations I take with my family and in-laws to northern Minnesota. What’s there not to love but a cabin in the woods? Well that depends on who you ask. My husband does’nt like to rough it, so our cabin in the woods is at a resort. Our cabin is a three-story duplex house with running water, air-conditioning and heating, marble countertops, a television and all the other comforts of home. It’s far from roughing it—It’s a house. But it’s a vacation away from home. Our cabin is lakeside and nightly we receive the most beautiful sunsets.
Sister Suffragettes, my contribution to this awesome anthology is inspired by an incident in the life of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a Black journalist, newspaper editor and leader in both the women’s suffrage and the civil rights movements. Because of her outspokenness and refusal to “play nice”, Mrs. Wells-Barnett often found herself at odds with the women’s suffrage movement. As a result, the leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) insisted that she not march with the Illinois delegation at President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, where they were demanding the right to vote. The reason? A black woman marching alongside whites would offend some Southern women. But Ida had other plans. On March 9, 1913, she watched the parade from the crowd until the Illinois delegation had passed then joined in, protected from angry Southerners by white women sympathetic to the plight of all women, regardless of race. Please read on
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the craft of writing these past few weeks. There have been quite a few “freebies” on Amazon/Nook and I must admit I’m a sucker for “those who bought this book also bought…..”. Taking a break from the task of actual writing and examining the craft of writing is both a benefit and a curse. The benefit is that I can now begin creating patterns in my writing. No matter what we write, I’m finding out, there is an underlying structure that works its way through the storyline. In fact, we are all writing the same stories over and over again, simply with different characters and situations. It’s okay, though. People love familiar structure. For example, Jaws, Alien, Panic Room and Fatal Attraction are all the same movie. Not the same plot, characters, etc, but if you screen all those movies, you will